BG - Wants Overhaul (Patreon)

I can't play the game without whims, I can't test mods if I don't play nor I can make new ones, so the wants and fear update was for me a godamn disaster. 

You see I play for achievements, I don't care for the boring dollhouse aspect of this game, I need to pop out those things and get points to feel like I'm playing. Whims before were fast paced, random, you could fulfil most of them in the span of few hours and click away the very annoying ones like "Have a child", "Ask this random arsehole who's not even close to the loaded lot to be boyfriend", "Chat with this other arsehole you randomly met once and haven't seen in 4 seasons since".

There is a reason they made them so slow: they removed at least half or the previous existing whims if not more, what's left is a small portion of rebranded old whims from the basegame (example, the Play Pipe Organ whim is still in the game files but was removed from the game). They removed whimsets from some traits like the Dance Machine and from some aspirations, and it sends me up a wall that they added wants only to the music preferences. 

Activity preferences don't have a whimset, so a sim who likes Fitness will never want to do anything related to its preferences. If you cannot click them away, you don't notice just how repetitive they are. They haven't even fixed the poits reward so fulfilling an hard whim like "chat with xyz" isn't even satisfiying for 25 points.

This is the usual lazy and half arsed implementation of a rebrand of an old system that was already perfectly fine as it was just to make people who were requesting it happy. It's not a new feature. Just a washed down old one, but this time it completely ruined the game for me. 

I don't think it can be fixed or even improved anymore... this game is just to throw in the rubbish bin, so I don't think this mod is going to make it better in any way, but I need to try... I spent to much money on this bloody thing to give up.

So what I did now in this desperate attempt to make the game playable for at least 10 minutes for me is:

Add a way to refresh wants

Sadly, I had to do it with an interaction that requires 2 clicks

You can refresh wants by type or all at once, as far as I can tell this is the scheme but Short Term Whims can also take the Long Term Whims spot

This is to simulate at best I can the old system where you could just remove the whims you didn't want.

Add Whimsets to the Activity Preferences 

To most of them anyway... no screenshot sorry the snap tool didn't save it and I can't be bothered loading the game again.

I brought back some old whims Maxis has left out and put them back in game by using the preferences traits that do not have a whimset.

This is to make the system a bit more random than rolling out the 

Read a book

Finish reading a book

Analyse a book

Read a book

Chain it uses now when your sim has, for example, the bookworm trait.

I don't even want to use preferences in game because they're a useless waste of time in CAS but here you go.

Tuned Down the Priority to the "Listen to XYZ Music" wants

I don't know why Maxis decided to add a whimset only to music preferences, probably because it was the easiest one, and gives the illusion that they implemented the feature. 

The music wants don't have an higher preference than other wants, they have the same one as everything else, 10... the problem there is that the whimsets only have one whim inside and this whims chains another whim from the same whimset when fulfilled... so basically it chains the same whim again... and again... and again... so you end up with "Listen to Pop Music" calling another "Listen to Pop Music" when fulfilled. I tried to tune down the priority to 3 from 10 so they should pop up less often. 

*** In the next update, writing it down otherwise I forget ***

Added Ability to Pin Confrontational Whims.

Brings Back Pets Related Whims

You have NO IDEA how it pissed me off to find out that the pet related whims like "walk a dog", "pet a dog", "adopt a pet" have been removed from the game (including from the cat lover and dog lover trait, YEP) and now when you add a pet to the household all the sims want to do is playing computer games... fuck them.

FEARS:

Dead End Job

The trigger of this one is ridicolous:

The countdown starts after your 3rd day of work, a buff is added if you come back from work after a day when you didn't make enough progresses, the buff lasts two days and is removed if the next day at work you make more than 15 points progress, if not the game adds the "fear of dead end job", regardless of personality traits. 

Changed to:

Incremental, the counter starts after 3 days of work as in vanilla, if you don't make enough progresses, a commodity starts counting the days you had poor performances, after 3 bad days (6 for workaholics) the buff is added. Once the buff is on, the sim has the 25% chances to get the fear, doubled in case of ambitious sims. If you make enough progresses in the career, a day is removed from the commodity, so the fear is harder to trigger and more logical to get.

Getting promoted will also help reducing the chance of getting the fear or work towards removing it

I wanted to do more but honestly I'm just too demoralised right now and just wanted to be able to play the game for 10 minutes to test the mods I still have to fix so we'll see about the rest of this awful feature. 

Fire

This one is almost fine as far as the trigger goes, if not that brave and adventurous sims should never be getting it. Also this is a kind of fear that once confronted should NEVER come back, so I added a 50% change to get a trait that gets rid of it for good when you confront it by vanilla means, should give you an incentive to follow the gameplay instead of clicking it away with UI cheats/removing it with a potion.

BUT it's not nearly impactful enough... it increases slighlty the chance to start a fire but only when cooking homestyle?! And that's it?? It doesn't do much else... added a tense buff while cooking and increased the chance to start a fire in all the other situations too.

This mod requires the XML INJECTOR for the interactions